This invention relates to a method of making a protective garment, a garment produced in accordance with the method, and a strand material used in the method and garment.
Protective garments have been well known and widely used in a number of applications and fields. By way of example, protective garments in the form of gloves are shown in Michael-Lohs U.S. Pat. No. 2,942,442; Byrnes U.S. Pat. No. 4,384,449; and Bettcher U.S. Pat. No. 4,470,251. The technology of making such protective garments disclosed in those prior patents has been applied to other similar types of garments, such as arm protectors made in the form of open ended tubes, aprons, shirts and the like.
While protective garments made as described in the aforementioned prior patents have achieved some success and acceptance, such garments have limitations in protecting wearers against injury from slashing and penetrating cuts. Such limitations may become of particular significance where such injuries may have the major secondary risk of opening the skin of a wearer to bacterial or viral infection, such as is the case with medical applications and the like. For these reasons, enhancement of the cut resistance of a protective garment is a constantly sought goal.
The prior patents suggest that cut resistance be sought by the use, in making protective garments, of high strength strand materials such as aramid fibers and metallic strands covered with synthetic strands. In the making of such garments, any metallic strands present have been and are covered in such a way as to be present only in the interior of the strand materials and thus serve a core strengthening purpose at most. The metallic strands present have not appeared at the surface of the garments where engagement with the cutting instrumentalities affecting the garment would occur. This has been the case due to the impossibility of manipulating the metallic strands in the conventional textile fabric forming processes used to make the garments, and particularly (in the case of the gloves disclosed in the patents mentioned above) knitting the metallic strands.